Television's "Marquee Moon" (33 1/3 excerpt)

Television's "Marquee Moon" (33 1/3 excerpt) Lyrics

"Venus"

If the opening track suggested urban out-of-doors, on “Venus” the landscape is explicitly defined as New York’s.

One of the oldest songs in Television’s repertoire, “Venus” existed in an acoustic version dating all the way back to Verlaine’s ventures into Greenwich Village folk clubs, pre-Neon Boys, pre-Reno Sweeney. “[H]ardcore Televisionaries will be pleased that ‘Venus de Milo’ is on the album,” Wolcott wrote in his review for Hit Parader, which he composed after just two pre-release listens when Verlaine and Smith brought master tapes to Lisa and Richard Robinson’s apartment. “[I]t’s to Television what ‘The Lady Is A Tramp’ is to Sinatra — a signature song. Like ‘Tramp’ it wears well: I’ve heard ‘Venus de Milo’ at least 70 times and have yet to tire of it.” John Rockwell, using the album’s release as an occasion for a retrospective on the underground’s last several years, suggested that Venus “epitomize[d] the whole scene”: “the distant, hypersensitive, painfully acute sensibility that permeates the late-night, fluorescent-lit New York landscape.” The song starts with nine and a half bars of intro — a full twenty seconds — before Verlaine comes in: more hesitation and anticipation. Ficca establishes a lighter tone than the earliest recorded versions of the song convey: 1-2-cha-cha-cha, whereas the beat in the Island demo had been almost martial.

The opening lines move us into story-land: “It was a tight toy night.” Again we’re confronted with a rather obscure phrase. Is it the night or the singer that’s tightly wound (in the Warholian sense of being “up-tight”)? Or is it just the sort of night that leaves you tightly wound, played with? The phrase is evocative but remains opaque: the alliteration (“tight toy”) and the internal rhyme (“tight/night”) call attention to the lyrics’ status as just words, hinting at Verlaine’s obsession with verbal play as much as anything else. But the opening structure lends to storytelling, stage-setting: here the streets are bright, the nocturnal atmosphere established by contrast, as if you need to escape the more brightly lit parts of town and find some darker quarter downtown in which to take solace.

“Broadway looks so medieval”: Tim Mitchell suggests Grace Church at Broadway between 10th and 11th Streets as the setting invoked in this line, the clearest signal that the album’s world is our own. But I’ve never biked down Broadway at night, the Woolworth Building’s lighted gothic spire looming at the bottom-most tip of Manhattan, without thinking of this lyric. The song’s geography has a downward sweep that corresponds with the repeated idea of fall/falling: in the third verse the friends wander down Broadway, which after dark, especially amid the nineteenth-century factories and warehouses of SoHo’s Cast-iron District, seemed positively abandoned. In the distance, towers hulked: the new World Trade Center looming. The Woolworth, once the epitome of modernity, seems dwarfed, hunchbacked and ancient.

As Lisa Robinson suggests in her memoir of these “Rebel Nights,” to downtown’s youthful inhabitants in the 1970s, that nighttime world was their own. Whatever SoHo factories remained operational were closed for the night or converted to performance spaces, blocks of seemingly abandoned buildings, inhabited here and thereby rogue theater companies, jazz ensembles, early no-wave noisemakers, or underground discos. Street traffic dwindled. A couple old bars catered to loft-livers and nocturnal freaks. The whole lower portions of the city, from the Village to TriBeCa, became a world occupied by the young and the hip, on one hand, or the hopelessly derelict on the other. The line between the two was thin at times.

Of all Television’s songs, “Venus” is the one that most overtly participates in one of the dominant trends of New York School poetry: the practice of dropping names of friends and fellow poets into your work to create a sense of community and/or cliquishness. (Contrast Television’s oeuvre on this score with Patti Smith’s, which brims with names and musical references that invoke a pantheon of Romantic and rock ‘n’ roll heroes.) The relevant lines from “Venus” offer the album’s most poignant reminder, left behind like a scar, of the falling out between Verlaine and Hell. Falling out: the word “fell” recurs at the end of the first and third verses, returning in each repetition of the chorus. At the end of the second verse we find “And I felt” where we’re previously heard “fell.” What is the relationship between falling and feeling? The song’s call-and-response structure perpetuates this conflation:

And I fell.

DIDJA FEEL LOW?

To fall is to feel? Nah. Not at all. The word “felt” follows the most personal verse, the one with a shout-out, most listeners have assumed, to Richard Hell by name. Though this song predates Television, which means it also predates the end of Hell and Verlaine’s friendship, by 1977 the words would have taken on additional meaning for many. If the anecdote about Richard suggesting that the friends dress up like cops is autobiographical — and there’s no reason to insist it has to be — the action probably took place during the period of time, in their early twenties, that Verlaine has described as a consistent period of drug use: “From 21 to 23,” he later said, “I was using all kinds of hallucinogenics.” The specificity of the time frame suggests that he put an end to drug use around the time Television formed, though most of his comments on the subject come retrospectively, after Hell’s departure from the band (amid gossip about his heroin use), and perhaps should be taken with a grain of salt. “People who mess with drugs, I can’t stand to be around them too long,” Verlaine would add in a typical aside, obviously flung in Hell’s direction. “Do you still experiment with drugs a lot?” one interviewer asked in 1976. Tom:

No, not much at all. I wouldn’t say really at all. Drugs are like... if you’re intuitive about things or something and you take drugs, they make you believe in your own intuitions more ‘cause there’s something very nebulous about drugs, and there’s something unspeakably true about what you go through with any given drug.

Richard Hell’s cameo in “Venus” had its parallels in Verlaine’s poetry. In the manuscript for the collection 28th Century, which Hell declined to publish following his departure from Television, one poem specifically invokes Hell. In it, Verlaine phones up Hell and tells him the time has come for a planned takeover, of what isn’t made clear. Richard responds by taking him less than seriously, and Tom pretends not to be himself. As in this poem, and as in “See No Evil” as well, “Venus” consists of a speaker engaged in dialogue with another character, or in this case a series of them. In the first verse it’s “another person who was a little surprised.” The second verse begins with a generic second person address: “You know it’s all like some new kind of drug.” The third verse brings us to a past-tense narration of the episode with Richie/Richard, who suggests they dress up like cops. Two other voices enter the song, though: the band’s responses to Verlaine’s calls (“I fell.” “DIJA FEEL LOW?”) and the voice of conscience at the end of the third verse: “But something, something said ‘You better not.’” That final bit of dialogue — an internal one between the speaker and a Donald Duck angel sitting on his shoulder — puns on the form of the song itself. When Verlaine sings “Something, something . . .” it sounds, even if you’ve heard the song hundreds of times, as if he’s forgotten the lyrics. A moment of disenchantment, it reminds us we’re not in lower Manhattan at all; rather, we’re caught up in a fantasy about would-be rockstars, a band of friends.

The notion that we’re dwelling in the realm of imagination is underscored by the song’s central refrain — “I fell into the arms of Venus de Milo” — which works in much the same way as the earlier “boat made out of ocean,” given that the Venus de Milo, at least as we know the statue, has no arms at all. “Do those amputated arms beckon? Or repulse?” asked Creem’s reviewer, Stephen Demorest. “Do they modestly try to cover her privates? The high ones or the low? Verlaine says: ‘The arms of Venus de Milo are everywhere. It’s a term for a state of feeling. They’re loving arms.’”

What we’ve fallen into, then, is love. Or emptiness. Or imagination. Which could mean nothing, or everything.

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About “Television's "Marquee Moon" (33 1/3 excerpt)”

An excerpt from Bryan Waterman’s book Marquee Moon on Television’s seminal album, part of Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 series.